ISSUE: Summer 2009
The dragonflies are only the first thing. How they’re
not what you think, or thought you would. Couldn’t this,
too, be rescue? And then how, eventually, you start
forgetting to ask. The air hangs heavy with the smell
of catalpa trees
at last in bloom, the flowers themselves
tossing for once neither like gratitude nor one of those
many hard-to-pin-down-exactly forms of what they
used to call divine favor, but as when, with a patience
more human, it seems, than animal, the lion tears the doe’s
body, as if forever,
steadily more open. There are ways
to be lost worse than this one. They can sway like suspicion—
like a river, as now. Nothing was was nothing nothing was
—that’s the river, singing. Almost, you can see it. Even from here.
